Frederick Wiseman, a director whose rigorously objective explorations of social and cultural institutions constitute one of the more revered bodies of work in American documentary filmmaking, died on Feb. 16 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 96.

Mr. Wiseman, who received an honorary Academy Award in 2016, was among the most influential directors of nonfiction cinema.

Mr. Wiseman’s last films were among his best received. The novelist Jay Neugeboren, writing in The New York Review of Books, called “In Jackson Heights” (2015), a panoramic portrait of a  diverse neighborhood, in Queens, “richly textured and sumptuously beautiful.” Reviewing “Ex Libris: The New York Public Library” (2017), Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called it “one of the greatest movies of Mr. Wiseman’s extraordinary career and one of his most thrilling.”